Earl Sterndale is part of the parish of Hartington Middle Quarter in the Derbyshire Dales. It was created as an ecclesiastical parish from a chapelry in 1763. It’s church, St Michael’s and All Angels, has the distinction of being blown up by the Luftwaffe with a stray bomb in 1941.
I’m posting about Earl Sterndale today because I came across this 1614 map in a file of documents – it’s a random find and to be honest it has no reference on so I don’t even know which book it was taken from by whoever copied it. It’s a reminder though that whilst I tend to teach history in a neat linear pattern that history itself is much more untidy. The fields shown are a mixture of open strip farming and enclosed land. Enclosure was something that began more or less in the thirteenth century and escalated until at the end of the eighteenth century farming practises and land ownership wrought wholesale enclosure.
Records indicate that the farms around Earl Sterndale were largely monastic granges belonging to Basingwerk Abbey, Flintshire, Wales. The abbey was a Cistercian foundation and it’s lands including the granges near Earl Sterndale were sold following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Basingwerk was a lesser monastery with an income of less that £200 per year. It is perhaps not surprising that Basingwerk Abbey held property and the rights to churches in other parts of Derbyshire including Glossop. But it’s not completely a monastic story – again history tends to be taught or written about in neat units but the distribution, in this case literally on the land, tells of different administration systems abutting one another and in some cases overlapping.
Within the medieval Manor of Hartington, of which Earl Sterndale was part land belonged in part to the Duchy of Lancaster – the land in Earl Sterndale once having been in the holding of the de Ferrers’ Earls of Derby until the 6th earl fell foul of Henry III and the land was given to Henry III’s second son – Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster. edmund’s great grand daughter Blanche (the daughter of Henry Grosmont the 1st Duke of Lancaster) married John of Gaunt – for those of you who like to make links.
Meanwhile the manor of Hartington of which Earl Sterndale was part worked on the three field open system where strips of land were allocated to various tenants (villeins). Rent was paid along with labour for the lord. In addition to which part of the manor functioned as demesne land which was farmed on behalf of the Duchy of Lancaster itself rather than the income all coming from tenants. By the fourteenth century sheep had become an important part of the venture for the Duchy – as it was for the Cistercian granges. I’ve read elsewhere that as the Black Death plotted it’s course in 1348 demsesne farming was abandoned in the parish of Hartington; it being more profitable to rent land out.
It’s also worth noting that the village of Earl Sterndale held common grazing rights to a portion of land adding yet another dimension to the equation of who held the land.
The map of 1614 pictured above demonstrates that the three field system with its open strips didn’t suddenly stop here at the end of the medieval period nor was the dissolution of the monasteries sufficient to bring about total enclosure. It is evident that strip farming around Earl Sterndale continued into the seventeenth century – although there is also evidence of enclosure in the form of Mr Thomas Nedham’s land. Enclosure when it finally came was at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Yesterday I found myself in the garderobe, sliding into a small space, ducking my head to avoid a low beam and then straightening to find myself in a priest hole. Fortunately for me no one was going to slam the lid back into place and leave me in total darkness until it was safe for me to emerge or I was discovered and dragged off to the Tower. I was enjoying a sunny afternoon at Oxborough Hall.
John Sheffield, the 3rd Earl of Mulgrave was born on the 7th April 1648. He inherited his title when he was a child. When he was eighteen he joined the fleet to fight against the Dutch in the Second Anglo Dutch war. He went on to command his own ship, the Royal Katherine, and was also made an infantry colonel having raised a regiment of foot. In 1680 he was sent to relieve the garrison of Tangiers.
However, his desired reward was not forthcoming! In 1682 Mulgrave was sent away from court for putting himself forward as a prospective groom for seventeen-year-old Princess Anne – the gossip mongers claimed that he’d progressed rather further with his courting than either James of Charles II liked. Mulgrave was thirty five at the time and had a reputation as a rake (hence the leaky Tangiers bound boat.) He was quick to report that he was “only ogling” the princess (charming) but at the time it was understood that he had written letters to the princess that were rather too personal. When he was banished from court in November 1682 speculation about Anne’s possible seduction was rife. There were plenty of risqué songs on the subject in London’s taverns.
Bills of Mortality , or the weekly list of deaths and their causes, were published in London during the final years of Queen Elizabeth I. Then from 1603 they were published continuously by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks.
There were 130 parishes in London. The weekly list gives historians an insight into the statistics of the period not to mention some of the mechanisms of the Grim Reaper. In the week commencing August 15 1665 8 people died from “winde,” another from “lethargy” whilst 190 were carried away by “fever and purples” which sounds downright unpleasant not to mention suspiciously like the bubonic plague. A total of 3880 souls were listed as having died from Yersinia pestis as the bacilli carried by fleas should be more correctly known.
Halley’s Comet made an appearance in 1066. Chinese scholars had been noting its appearance since 240BC so Western Europe was a bit late to the party. The Babylonians were in on the act as well.
Essentially the Normans and the Londoners who saw the comets in 1066, 1664 and 1665 (there were two rather than one prior to the plague and Great Fire of London) believed that they were fiery messengers of the heavens – a direct line from God. They were an indication of his irritation with humanity and a heavy hint that something extremely unpleasant was bound to follow. If it wasn’t fire, war and plague then someone important was bound to die.
The plague began in Yarmouth in the winter of 1664. By Christmas the disease had spread to London. The weekly Bills of Mortality were about to become extremely depressing. Not that it was a surprise. In 1065 the plague was endemic in England. On average it put in an appearance every couple of decades. There had been an outbreak in 1603 which rather quelled James I’s coronation celebrations. In 1625 – the year James had died approximately twenty percent of London’s population had succumbed to the disease. The first official mortality of the 1665 outbreak was in St Giles in the Fields – plague and typhus started to take their toll the numbers recorded on the Bills of Mortality began to rise. The Great Comet prophecy had been fulfilled – plague had arrived.
Charles Lucas was one of Margaret Cavendish’s brothers. An anti-Royalist mob sacked their home in 1642. This was when Madge was sent off to Oxford to live with her sister. She gained a place as one of Henrietta Maria’s ladies in waiting and went into exile with her.
At the end of the First English Civil War in 1647 the men who had fought against the king found themselves in disagreement. One group of politicians wanted to reach a settlement with the king other groups wanted more radical reforms. It is safe to say that none of them trusted one another much by the end of 1647. The Putney Debates, held at St Mary’s Church Putney in the autumn of 1647 presented the views of different factions within the army.
During 1642 Parliament and the Crown laid out their various pieces on the chess board that was England. Each side attempted to take control of places of strategic importance. Having passed the Militia Bill, Parliament thought that it had control of the Commissions of Array and the appointment to offices such as Lord Lieutenantry responsible for the raising of armed forces. They also assumed that they would have control of each county’s official magazine (by law each county was required to have a stockpile of arms). However, this didn’t stop the king sending his own commissions nor for that matter some Lord Lieutenants declaring for the king.